What’s New?

Well, here it is. The best book by my favorite author. Not my favorite book; that would be A Tale of Two Cities. But The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery, by most accounts, the masterpiece of Charles Dickens. It’s my fourth reading of David, and my second since starting this blog. What could I possibly have that’s new to say about one of the greatest of all novels?

If I have anything new to say, it isn’t about marriages in the book or about David’s memory. I wrote about those topics in February and March of 2011 in two of my four posts about DC. (Good Heavens! Did I really write four posts on one book? How did I find the time while I was working? I definitely don’t have the time now that I’m retired.) In revisiting those posts, there is one detail I seem to have left out. It occurred to me nine years ago that David’s vivid memories actually fulfill the predictions of the neighborhood ladies at his birth that he would see ghosts.

My new contribution isn’t that Steerforth and Dora look different as I reread the book and mature. Many critics before have written about David’s “undisciplined heart.” Even though the David who writes the first-person narrative is older and wiser than the David we watch in the story, he invites the reader to see the world as his younger self did, through his undisciplined heart, and I, for one, believed what David first said about his school hero and his future wife and tried to love them as much as he did. But David and I both learned as we got older.

No, what I wish to add to the conversation concerns the power of Dickens’s influence across oceans and across generations.

First, something very familiar jumped out at me when I read these sentences:

With the unerring instinct of her noble heart, she touched the chords of my memory so softly and harmoniously, that not one jarred within me; I could listen to the sorrowful, distant music, and desire to shrink from nothing it awoke. How could I, when, blended with it all, was her dear self, the better angel of my life?

I don’t remember noticing the connection before, but this time I couldn’t help but be jolted by the phrases chords of memory and better angel. The second was certainly common before Dickens made use of it, and the first might have preceded him. But the close proximity (is there such a thing as distant proximity? I apologize for the redundancy) of the two striking turns of phrase must have had an influence on Abraham Lincoln since they appear together again in the last sentence of his first inaugural address just eleven years later. Now, I’ve read that William Seward wrote the peroration of that speech, so perhaps the future Secretary was responsible for the innocent, complimentary plagiarism. But surely Lincoln, the eloquent humorist, was familiar with the works of the creator of Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller, Captain Cuttle, and Wilkins Micawber.

Second, I believe that David Copperfield had thoroughly simmered in Tolkien’s mind by the time the later writer invented one of his best characters. Uriah Heep’s pale skin and hands that feel like dead fish might constitute a true connection without being absolutely convincing. But look at these paragraphs involving the odious junk dealer who buys little David’s clothes from him:

‘Oh, what do you want?’ grinned this old man, in a fierce, monotonous whine. ‘Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!’

I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by the repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of rattle in his throat, that I could make no answer; hereupon the old man, still holding me by the hair, repeated:

‘Oh, what do you want? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo!’--which he screwed out of himself, with an energy that made his eyes start in his head.

‘I wanted to know,’ I said, trembling, ‘if you would buy a jacket.’

‘Oh, let’s see the jacket!’ cried the old man. ‘Oh, my heart on fire, show the jacket to us! Oh, my eyes and limbs, bring the jacket out!’

Now let any honest person read that passage and tell me that that junk dealer isn’t the progenitor of Gollum!

I Am Torn About Coleridge

Each year for the last fourteen, I’ve chosen one classic poet to read rather thoroughly. Last year it was Longfellow, for instance, and this year it was Coleridge. Part of my self-given liberal education has been devoted to learning to appreciate poetry in the English language from the days of meter and form. Since no school ever trained me in the art of reading this literature, and since I have indeed been steadily growing in my understanding, almost every poet becomes a new treasure to me. I liked Longfellow so much more than I thought I would!

So it came as a surprise to find that Coleridge disappointed me. It’s presumptuous of me to think I know enough to say that he struck me as inferior in skill to Shelley and Wordsworth, although that’s the way the situation looks to me. But my dissatisfaction came from something else. After all, a poet can pale in comparison to Wordsworth and still be very, very good. Partly, I just didn't like reading his many overtures to the woman he wished he had married or his eloquent, poetic laments on how he couldn't write poetry anymore.

But then this reaction might have come from the peculiar arrangement of the collection I read. In the Penguin edition I had, editor Richard Holmes arranges the 101 poems he selected into eight categories: Sonnets, Conversational Poems, Ballads, Hill Walking Poems, “Asra” Poems, Confessional Poems, Visionary Fragments, and Topical Poems. So I read, for instance, fourteen poems written to the secret object of his heart in a row. (Was she a secret, though? Was anyone at the time really fooled by his respelling of Sara as Asra?) The happy result of this arrangement, though, is that the poems I enjoyed most also came one after another and seemed to magnify the beauty and power in each other. So I was torn about Coleridge. Some mornings I rushed to the book and was rewarded, and on other days I trudged to my reading knowing I was going to cover thirty more pages of irrationality or immorality.

I know I became acquainted with many new poems in reading the Coleridge collection, but I want to end with a few remarks about “The Eolian Harp,” which I’ve known and enjoyed for many years. It is undoubtedly beautiful. “The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of silence” is just pretty stuff, with all its sibilant s’s imitating the watery susurration and the quaint extra suffix on the word still. And some of the images are marvelous:

Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing!

Or how about the rhythm on these lines:

Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

The successive accents on breeze and warbles and again on mute and still (with their viscous t-s-t sound combination) slow down the line to match the calm cadence of the air.

But then, what does the poem mean? I’ve read that the focal point of the poem called “The Eolian Harp” is the harp itself, not the descriptions of the idyllic setting, and its suggestion to Coleridge’s mind that he ask whether perhaps

all animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

But then Coleridge follows that climax with a but. The woman he sits with reminds him that this view is not orthodox Christian doctrine, and he says he is brought to his senses and becomes grateful again for “Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honored Maid!" Does Coleridge believe in his supposition that he is only a material instrument animated by the collective soul of the universe? Or does he believe the Christian orthodoxy of Sara? If he favors the idea of the World Soul, why does he end with Sara’s correction? If he’s comfortable with his Christianity at this moment, why does he write us such a lovely poem depicting his flight of fancy? It seems Coleridge was torn about himself, too.